Game Objectives
- Emulator: BizHawk 2.4.2
- Conquers all 30 obstacles and arrives at the staircase in front of the school
- Aims for earliest input end
- Genre: Adventure
- Genre: Sport
About the Game (or rather a short summary of its manual)
Plot
One day, on your way to school you realize that a lot of obstacles appeared on the streets overnight. As a skater you feel challenged to skate over as many ramps and through as many pipes as possible while still arriving at school in time. You’ve got 5 minutes and a total of 30 obstacles to cope with.
Mechanics
- Use the joystick to move the character
- Press the button to hop onto your skateboard. Press the button while on the skateboard to jump; if you hold the button, you’ll crouch after the jump.
- While crouching, you can slightly adjust your y-position with the joystick
- By skitching occasionally driving by trucks you obtain a speed boost
- Your speed decreases while driving on grass
Speed
In this game the speed-value is stored in only one single memory address (0x66). It describes both the vertical and horizontal speed.
| Action | Speed value |
|---|
| standing | 0 |
| walking | 20 |
| skating | 40 |
| After skitching | 63 |
(very rarely the speed-value decreases by one after transitioning to another screen, I am not entirely sure why though)
Glitches and Tricks used
- Jumping over ramps, but not jumping forward. When the x-position is aligned fittingly, it is possible to cancel the jump in x-direction.
- After getting my speed boost, I was able to jump a super long jump and was able to get another ramp counted as well. I have absolutely no Idea how or why though…
- one time I transition between screens directly INTO a ramp, but everything still worked :)
Route
First of all, the
full map (start stairs bottom left; finish stairs middle right).
I also created a TAS, which aims for the
fastest ingame time (The submitted TAS ends with 3:01 minutes remaining, while this one ends with a time of 3:03. However, the movie itself is 19 frames longer). Here is
its route (only the last part is different). (I didn’t really search for this, but as I was trying to find the optimal way of tackling the last few obstacles I realized I can just keep the fastest ingame time route as well, because it felt like another appropriate goal for this game, too.)
Making of this TAS
With no doubt, the main difficulty that arised was the routing for this time attack. It was especially tricky, because of two things, namely the truck speed boost and the final goal to finish at the school’s stairs. I have tased many routs to be now satisfied with this one. One important thing to note is that
this sadly doesn’t work.
The big question I had, was when exactly should I get the trucks boost and in which order should the obstacles be done then. For exactly this purpose I divided the map into this
sections. The only thing that was quite clear form the beginning was, that I needed to end somewhere in the blue area, such that I was done near the final stairs. I tried many routs in my head first, before starting to tas them one by one. However, it quickly became clear, that getting the boost (yellow) at the very beginning was not a good idea. I realized, I needed to finish the purple area first before any other one. After that though, I had to try out pretty much every single route, which seemed to be at least a little bit promising (that’s also where most of the rerecords come from). After comparing the results of each route, this submitted one ended up being the fastest.
In the end I added some maneuvers for entertainment purposes.
Possible Improvements:
Well, of course a better route.
Furthermore, if it’s possible to transition from the lowest screens to the uppermost ones by going out of bounds or whatever, I guess this time could be beaten (the walls are strong though… I kinda don’t see this coming).
Memory: This TAS seems well optimized with it's routing.
The various tricks on display here, notably the skitching, and the decent music make this Atari 2600 run actually fairly fun to watch. I'm typically not all that fond of Atari TASes, so this was a welcome surprise to me. The audience liked it as well for the most part.
Accepting to Moons.
Whether to put the movie in the Vault or Moons is a tough call. Most A2600 games go to the Vault. However Crane's Activision essentially created the concept of third-party development because the talent of Crane and others was going unappreciated in-house at Atari. Activision is well-represented among the few A2600 Moons. This game came along after Crane had moved on to Absolute, but the point remains that his quality typically exceeds that of in-house Atari or the flood of Activision wannabes that contributed to the '83 crash. Anyway, the game is a fun time, and the skitchin' adds extra entertainment. I think that the movie belongs in Moons.
According to the manual, you are Totally Awesome, so congrats on that as well.
